Trentonian editorial: Psyching the psephologists

Saturday, October 13, 2012

The media have taken their seats in the Obama cheering section. No surprise there. They are, after all, Democratic season ticket holders. But what about others? Pollsters, for example. Are they showing sufficient team spirit?

We assumed yes, until recently. Most of the polls until recently showed Obama cruising along in the lead based on, it turned out upon closer scrutiny, factors that seem calculated to assure such results. Some of the polling, for example, relied on registered rather than likely voters, thus giving Democrats an edge in the “random” sampling.

When polls did use likely instead of registerd voters in surveys, they tended to rely on 2008 voter turnout models that seemed unlikely to be repeated in 2012 but worked to President Obama’s advantage. There has been much kvetching about this among conservatives and counter-kvetching among liberals. Pysching the psephologists, you might say — the folks who study elections or in other words folks in need of getting a life. The result has been a tutorial on “scientific” polling indicating it’s more of a subjective art than an objective science. It turns out that just a minor tweaking in the wording of a question can dramatically alter the poll results. So too can countless other factors such as, to cite just one, how many survey calls are made to cell phones as opposed to how many to land lines.

How the polling is done is not just an issue of interest to candidates and political insiders. Polls can and do affect fundraising. (Who wants to waste bucks on a “loser”?) Polling thereby, and otherwise, can create a “trend” toward Candidate A and away from Candidate B.

Has the conservative kvetching about polling changed the polling? Have the pollsters made little tweaks here and there in response, just for CYA purposes? It would be surprising if they haven’t. Does the recent shift in the polling in Mitt Romney’s favor perhaps reflect a bit of defensive pollster response, helping along Romney’s post-debate “bump”? Liberals are wondering. Hey, why should should conservatives be able to hog all of the paranoia regarding polling?

Liberal jawboning on the polls has yielded at least one notable achievement for the left, according to an Alan Abramowitz account on Huffington. In calculating President Obama’s approval ratings, Gallup, he says, was nagged into hiking the sample percentage of nonwhites surveyed from 27 to 32 percent. Result: Obama’s approval rating surged from 47 to 53 percent. Ah, the magic of “scientific” polling!

We keep wondering about the insidious effects of race in polling. Are there people in the survey sample who are reluctant to say they’re voting for Romney because they don’t want to be thought of as racially prejudiced? (Or because they are indeed racially prejudiced?) The pollsters insist they have ways to screen such people out. Still, we wonder. Wandering off into the weeds of one recent survey, the Investor’s Busisness Daily/TIPP poll — a poll with a solid record of proven accuracy — we noted that Romney is doing much better among what’s known as the “Bubba” cohort, working class whites, than John McCain did, leading Obama a whopping 64-28 percent. And presumably this ominous figure for Obama has screened out the closet Archie Bunkers.